


stranger things than these

by mildlydiscouraging



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Casual Death, Character Study, F/F, Gen, Hipster Love, Interns & Internships, Real Life, Self-Discovery, Talking Animals, Typical Night Vale Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-18 21:58:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10625943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mildlydiscouraging/pseuds/mildlydiscouraging
Summary: A tattered banner that reads "The NVCR Former Intern Support Group" hangs in front of the short stage in the Rec Center. Dana is still coughing from the dust it had let loose when she pulled it out of the storage closet, and Maureen hasn't stopped glaring, possibly because she's trying to set it on fire with just her eyes (it wouldn't be the first time). All in all, an inauspicious start to their first meeting.





	

**Author's Note:**

> brief content warnings, nothing major. there's a scene where dana smokes, maureen's parents kind of suck, brief heteronormativity, and some mild gore while maureen does homework.

A tattered banner that reads "The NVCR Former Intern Support Group" hangs in front of the short stage in the Rec Center. Dana is still coughing from the dust it had let loose when she pulled it out of the storage closet, and Maureen hasn't stopped glaring, possibly because she's trying to set it on fire with just her eyes (it wouldn't be the first time). All in all, an inauspicious start to their first meeting.

"Are we waiting on anyone?" Dana asks. She is still in pieces of her traditional mayoral garb: her heavy black velvet cloak is thrown over one of the chairs in the circle, ivory and turquoise rings still heavy on her fingers. She digs a headband out of the depths of her purse and uses it to push the hair (still sticky with cobwebs) out of her eyes.

"Is there anyone else even capable of coming?"

Maureen leans her chair back even further, somehow still not falling over. Dana narrows her eyes but doesn't say anything, just maybe willing her to fall over a little. Or a lot.

"Kareem," Dana says, but she knows Maureen is already not listening again. That's fine, though. It's not that unusual.

After all that muddy business with the strangers, and Chad's subsequent disappearance, Dana is more determined than ever to keep the remaining former interns together. The first few attempted meetings had fallen through thanks to Maureen's increasingly ridiculous excuses that eventually devolved into "I just don't want to, okay?", but now that Kareem has also moved on, Dana is determined to get them all to talk.

"He's not coming," Maureen says after a little longer wait. "He's in class right now and it's a discussion day, so he won't be back for a couple of weeks."

Dana closes her eyes and breathes out her nose, just like her mother taught her for when she and her brother were fighting.

"If you knew the whole time, why didn't you tell me."

Maureen shrugs. The movement upsets her chair a little but she lets the legs fall to the floor and sits upright like that was the plan all along. She only kind of pulls it off, but Dana pretends she didn't see. No one can ever accuse her of not being nice.

"Killing time," she says. She starts to take her phone out when Dana sighs.

"Come on," she says for what feels like the thousandth time. "We're the only two people in the entire world who have been through what we have and survived. I mean, I know we as a town don't like to acknowledge this, and in fact aren't usually allowed to, but I can say it, I'm the mayor: An NVCR internship is incredibly fatal. We are the only people who know all that entails."

"How come you don't make Cecil come to these things then?" Maureen folds her arms. "I mean, he's made the furthest out of all of us, why isn't he forced to be here?"

"Because he never went away?" Dana sighs as the meaning float uselessly around in her brain without the right words to go with them. "I don't know, Cecil's got his own thing going. He eat, sleeps, and breathes radio, he doesn't understand what it's like trying to move past it."

"Right..." Maureen sounds unconvinced, and she sighs and claps her hands on her lap. "Well, I'm out."

She's almost to the door by the time Dana processes it. "Wait, what?"

Maureen stops with her hand on the door handle. "I'm going home. You can sit around in silence all you want, but I've got shit to do."

"We have to talk about this, Maureen," Dana says. She stands and puts her hands on the back of Maureen's now empty chair. "We have to talk about what happened, or we'll end up just like all the others."

"I don't want to talk about," Maureen snaps, "I want it to be over with already."

The door slams shut behind her and Dana is alone in the empty gymnasium. It is raining, and dark, and the radio playing down the hall is the only other sound.

<©>

Dana pulls the thick hood off her head and sighs. A glance at the small digital clock on her desk brings only further disappointment to this Sunday night. Still another two hours before she can go home, one if the City Council approves her motion to ban the six to seven hour on Sundays. She sent off that proposal a week ago, though, right before their spontaneous vacation to Guatemala, so she's not that hopeful.

Instead of putting her hood back on and getting on with the last of her work for the day, Dana watches her clock. The numbers are stagnant and unblinking in all their mouthwash beauty. She loses the impromptu staring contest after what feels like much longer than a minute. If she didn't know better, she would think someone had tampered with it—either time or her clock. She did know better, though, and refrained from thinking anything at all, even that which she knew to be true. Especially that.

In the desk drawer, Dana knows, are two batteries, round like candies or flattened bullets. She doesn't open the drawer, but she knows they are there nonetheless. It stays locked by her solitary key.

It's one more hour.

<©>

It was after the first time Maureen "died" that her parents "kicked her out". She came back from half a year in the desert to find they had thrown out all her things and turned her room into a craft studio. They were apparently too grief-stricken every time they walked past her open door and decided to get rid of everything only a week after she disappeared. Not even "was declared dead", just working based off one stupid vague thing Cecil said on the radio.

So she got an apartment. She got a puppy (firmly past tense) and a chatty neighbor. There was some secondhand furniture, whatever she could carry out of her parent's, and not much else. She didn't need a lot of clutter, and she spent most of her time on her laptop anyway.

Said laptop was all she was using now, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her living room. Despite the fact that she had enough credits to graduate three times over, she was still stuck at the community college until she met her internship requirement. They wouldn't let her leave, or stop attending classes, or graduate, or do much of anything else until she did, and since Cecil wouldn't sign the stupid letter, she was waiting in academic limbo.

Thankfully, almost everything was online now, and since there were no new subjects she was taking the same handful of classes over and over. It was great in that she didn't have to write any new essays, but it was also mind-numbingly boring. It was the same routine, day in, day out: wake up, shower, think about eating breakfast, peel off one of her fingerprints to log into her computer, click all the right buttons without thinking, and stare at the wall for the rest of the day. It was  _dull_.

This day was nothing different. After wrapping her little finger in some of the copious amounts of bandage present in every Night Vale home, she dug out her essays on the brick composition of the Brown Stone Spire and the importance of _Orwell's Politick_ , the governmental handbook read to every child, submitted them, and then sat back against the foot of her tiny sofa.

She should really put something on that wall. She spends so much time staring at it, she should probably at least make it worth staring at. She could paint it a cool color, maybe. Put up a poster or something. Art.

Maybe she could put up shelves—but then she'd need something to put on them too. Shit.

It feels like rebuilding from the ground up, and Maureen hates it, not because she's afraid of change, but it's just so much to do. She hits refresh on her email.

<©>

Election season is soon approaching, and although it is largely inconsequential as the Hidden Gorge usually picks the incumbent and the votes don't matter, there are still obligations.

It feels like Dana's whole life is made up entirely of obligations.

On her desk now is a heavy black phone, thick spiraled cord anchoring handset otherwise untethered, and the unabridged Mayoral Phone Book.

(God, Dana was tired of that word. Sure, she was honored to be mayor, but it was just getting annoying having the addendum on everything she does and owns. She's the mayor, yeah, but she's also still just Dana. She can use a regular phone book, as blacked out and redacted as it would be.)

Flipping to a page at random, Dana punches in the first set of numbers she sees. All she gets is silence, in a fuzzy way, but Dana leaves her practiced message regardless. When the static is overlaid with heavy breathing she hangs up.

The next two hours have largely the same result, with some voicemails, a brief scream before a silence, and a few short conversations in between.

"Hello," she says for probably the thirty-second time, as soon as the line stops ringing, "this is Dana Cardinal, your mayor."

"Dana?"

"Carlos?"

"Hi!"

Dana slumps back into her chair and sighs out all the breath in her lungs. "Hi," she says, her public voice melting away. "How are you?"

"Good, good. Phonebanking?"

"Yeah." She laughs tiredly. "That time of year, I guess. I'm glad to hear a friendly voice. Not to say that the people I've talked to tonight aren't friendly," she adds for the Secret Police officer listening. "All the people of Night Vale are friendly and welcoming."

Carlos doesn't seem perturbed by her sudden tonal change. "Right! I know how that feels. I dabbled in politics in college. It must be hard to connect with so many people, though."

"You wouldn't believe how many numbers I've dialed today," she says. Her fingers dance around the old-timey dial, clockwise, counterclockwise, every other, spelling words and names. "Mostly answering machines, but still."

There is no sound, but she knows Carlos is nodding. "That's why I'm a scientist," he says emphatically. "The numbers I deal with can't talk back. It's much less draining that way."

Dana doesn't laugh, but she thinks about doing so, which has the same effect. After all that time alone in the desert, and Carlos appearing as the first physical human she'd seen in over a year, and then sharing that experience, they had become good friends.

The hedging weight of talking to so many people she was responsible was lightened by a conversation with no obligations. The words are easy, unscripted and unjudged, no expectations. They chat about their days with no destination until there is a noise in the background on Carlos's end.

"Oh!"

Carlos's voice moves away as he talks to himself for a second and Dana's ear lists into the receiver.

"That's Cecil," he says when he comes back, "he's back with pizza. Do you wanna talk to him?"

The whole world opens up on the other end of the call. Suddenly her office, with its closed door and dominating furniture, isn't just connected to another box in the nothing only linked to her by sound. Carlos has space, he has family and plans and places to go next.

"Oh," she says limply. "No, no, that's fine. I'll let you guys get to your evening."

"Are you sure? I bet Cecil would love to talk to you, he's just in the driveway right now." Carlos sounds worried but distant, obviously thinking about something else.

"No, I've still got calls to make."

"And miles to go before you sleep?"

This time Dana doesn't want to laugh but does anyway. "If I don't finish by the end of the night the City Council will have my hide, and I think their collection is extensive enough."

Carlos says something else, but Dana has already mentally hung up and, after a goodbye, does so literally as well. The click finishes echoing a beat too quickly and the room is still not bathed in silence like Dana wished it was. City Council hums down the hall, a janitor bumbling past her door, the noisy sunset leaking in the window. Noise. Always noise.

<©>

Unemployment works in a very particular way in Night Vale, a way Maureen in particular hates. What with the mess her mandatory internship credits turned into, Maureen is both directionless and pretty fucking frustrated. Most importantly, though, not having all that danger to distract her from the fact that she's broke has been a real detriment to her momentum in life.

Every Tuesday afternoon, the only time the Night Vale Unemployment Bureau is open, finds Maureen on a park bench downtown eating the least expensive scone available at the Ralph's. This Tuesday in particular she is waiting for a call from the post office, phone balanced on her crossed knee, fingers absentmindedly tugging at the thread stuck in her boot.

A few depressingly familiar faces lead in and out of the building, but Maureen, as always, refuses to follow. She never sets foot inside until the storefront is empty two minutes before they close. Jobs are just as likely to find her here as they are few feet to the east, she argues, so why go in?

It's there, one boot on the sidewalk, that she gets the call. The rejection, again, without mercy or contrition, again.

She throws the phone down and groans when it bounces harmlessly back up. Of _course_ this is one of those rubber concrete days. This town hates her, that's the only answer.

"Hey there Maureen!"

Or there's another possibility...

Maureen stands up, not bothering to pick up her phone, and marches straight up to stick her finger in the face of Night Vale's most beloved voice.

"Cecil. Gershwin. Palmer."

The owner of the voice and the name stops, his face the perfect picture of surprise.

"Uh," Carlos, who Maureen has only just noticed is also there, says. "I'll meet you there?" He squeezes Cecil's arm and drops it, eyeing Maureen warily as he passes her.

"What's up?"

Cecil's face is now also the picture of innocence, and she hates every inch of it.

"You keeping me from ever getting another job is what's up." Maureen picks up her intact phone and waves it in his face. "Guess who I just heard from? The post office.  _They_ said they couldn't hire me because I had 'no references' and was 'already spoken for', which, what the hell does that mean?"

Cecil blinks, once, twice, leans back out of the splash zone as Maureen's tirade swells bigger than the two of them. "Listen," he says, as he is often wont to do, "I'm sorry you're unemployed. It's a tough job market out there for our young people, and—"

"Save it," Maureen cuts him off. "I've heard that one a million times."

Cecil grins—an unsettling cousin of his smile, which is also slightly unsettling. "Of course you have. You have so many valuable skills. You were one of our best interns, Maureen. Not the best, nor brightest, but still a very good one."

"Thanks? I guess."

Maureen isn't used to being praised while trying to yell at someone.

"You always will be."

She opens her mouth to continue her interrogation, but Cecil just smiles (less unsettling) and pats the air half a foot in front of the space her shoulder occupies.

"Don't worry," he says as he starts to walk slowly past her. "There's always a place for you at the station."

Maureen turns to watch him disappear into the sudden crowd that appears as though summoned exactly for the purposes of this exit. Even though Cecil is almost out of view, and there is a turbulent sea of people between them, his words still sound like they're coming from right in front of her static body.

"Once an intern, always an intern," Cecil says. And Maureen is left with nothing—no job, no answers. Exactly where she started.

<©>

As the mayor Dana gets a lot of perks. She thinks it's probably to distract her from how perilous and ultimately futile the job is, if Pamela was anything to judge by. She has stop sign _and_ light immunity, the librarians never call for her dreams in the dark, and she gets her mandatory slice at Big Rico's for free every week.

She tries to avoid them—both to stay grounded like the citizens she represents, and also because she's learned kindness comes at a price. The only time she'll ever reap the advantages is when they benefit more than just her.

This time it's for her brother. April is among the people of Night Vale with a vengeance, and she aims to drop by the pharmacist before the shelves get raided. There the cashiers tend to fall to their knees when the door rings for her, offering up not-really-free samples and telepathically pushing anyone in line back three feet to make room for her.

"Whatever you've got for pollen."

Just this one time, on her last stop before her mother's, she allows it, lets the world spin around her for a minute. Her brother has been absolutely miserable with allergies and if she has to listen to both his complaints and sniffles all through dinner tonight, she might implode. So in a way it was for her sake too, but only just a little.

"Will that be all today, Mayor Cardinal?"

"Yes, thank you."

Besides, Amanda the cashier was new. Dana knows what happens when she doesn't take advantage of their mandatory niceness, and she doesn't want to get them in trouble so soon.

She likes to prevent trouble whenever possible. It's one of the things that makes her such a good mayor.

<©>

If you had asked Maureen three months ago if she had any records, she would have rolled her eyes, sighed, and blown you off with a "What, like some kind of hipster? No thanks, I think I'll care about more important things, if I have to care about anything."

Today it would probably be the same thing: A scoff and a flippant remark. But there would be a defensiveness to it, barely noticeable but still sharp. That would be because it is a lie.

Besides the very little furniture or personal touches in her apartment, there was one thing that sort of dominated the decor: music. Tapes kept safe in the toaster, records in crates appropriated from back alleys, CDs on CDs on CDs in towers next to her bed, even music boxes and a pile of Zunes taking up a whole half of the sofa. All from Michelle.

Maureen, if she were inclined to think deeper on the subject, would call it a form of courting. As is, she just calls it clutter. If you ask. If you don't she calls it

"Cute." Maureen picks up the package resting resting on her doorstep. The air around it smells like charged hot iron and chai, so it must have been dropped off by the landlord only a little while ago. She unlocks her door with the key in her teeth and kicks it open. No one tells her how to open her own damn doors.

Placing the package on the table, she uses the key to split the tape and shakes out three cassettes wrapped together with saran wrap. She doesn't even bother checking the return address, just pops the tape labelled first into the tape player always on her coffee table.

The soft sound of pots being slowly filled with liquid fuzzes through the foamy earmuffs as Maureen unwraps the note in the the plastic. It's written on the back of an oat colored flyer, a heavy pulpy sheet pleasantly marred by familiar and definitely illegal penmanship.

"Maureen," it reads, "here's the recording I made yesterday. It's like ambient music? But specific to me. Personal ambiance. So it's pretty much the most independent music can be, making it the most  _art_ art can get. Whatever. I'll probably hate it by tomorrow, so you're doing me a favor taking it off my hands. Anyway, call me. Or send a carrier raven. I only answer carrier ravens now. Unless you call. Michelle."

The sound abruptly cuts to wind whistling through a cracked open bathroom window and Maureen smiles as she clips the tape player to her belt loop. When she thumbs the signature on the note, it smears its dark blue into the cracks of her fingerprint. Somehow messages from Michelle are always fresh, like she had written them seconds before, and they still smell like dust and ink. She's always so cutting edge.

Maureen hangs the note on the fridge with her one magnet and closes her eyes on her surrounding's noises to focus on those of Michelle whispering into her own refrigerator.

<©>

There aren't many stray animals in Night Vale. That was one of Dana's retroactive campaign promises, and she was proud of having accomplished and sustained it. Even the feral dog population, usually so vocal about animal rights in their street art, agree she's done a wonderful job in keeping that promise in particular. Or at least, that's what the she thought the spray paint on her garage door had said. It was hard to read their handwriting sometimes.

So when she steps outside during the Council meeting that evening and meets a cat sitting on a crate in the alley she is... surprised, to say the least. A little irked at Sam. She thought they said the Secret Police got them all.

Dana shrugs and goes back to what she was doing, digging around in her pockets. The sky is peachy and rumbling high above her head, completely dry, and it's encompassing glow casts the alley in a gently alien light.

_Those things will kill you._

She drops the thin packet of cigarettes she had just started to pull out of her deepest pocket.

_Or whatever. Really it's you killing you, but that doesn't sound as smooth._

"I know," Dana says, even though she cannot see who she is talking to.

 _Hey,_ the cat says, stepping off the crate.

Or at least, she thinks it does. She thinks, because the voice is projected into her head just as she looks at it, and it is unfamiliar as one of the many voices in our heads we grow to recognize over our lives, and also because when she points at it questioningly, the cat nods.

 _Yeah, me,_  the voice continues. _You Dana?_

Dana nods. "Don't tell anyone?" She asks, in reference to the cigarettes, but also as a bit of a joke about how everyone already knows her name.

The cat purrs and it sounds like a laugh in her head. The aural discord thrums against the base of her skull as she asks, "Who are you?"

_No one's ever asked. I guess I don't have an answer planned. Julian?_

"Alright. It's nice to meet you." Dana sticks out her hand to shake and retracts it almost as quickly. "Sorry, force of habit."

 _Habits are hard to break for a reason._ Julian does the cat version of shrugging, which Dana recognizes without knowing how.

"So, Julian," Dana says, straightening, "how may I help you?"

 _You can drop the Authority act._ Julian flicks their tail. _I'm here for Dana the former intern, not Dana the current mayor._

"Oh." Dana sags, both in losing her working posture and in her general air. She leans back against the cool brick of City Hall and feels her lungs push closer to it, then farther away, but it still doesn't feel right.

Julian sits, tucking their paws neatly in front of them, and stares up at Dana.

_You still keep in touch with the radio guy, yeah?_

"Yes," Dana says. She crouches down to look the cat in the eye. It feels rude not to.

_Can you have him tell that floating bastard, Khoshekh, something for me?_

"I mean, sure, I guess. I don't see him all that often, but I can pass something along."

Julian flicks their tail. _Tell him he's a righteous prick and that just because he can't leave that bathroom doesn't mean he doesn't owe me that money._

"Uh... okay."

With one last nod and nose twitch, Julian disappears around the corner. Dana fishes out her cigarettes again and stands, lighting one with the lighter she got for her fourth birthday.

Thunder rumbles but the sky stays clean. Standing here, in an empty alley, arms appearing from folds of black velvet to keep a light, carrying a message like bags of groceries in still-small arms, she feels paper thin. Transmutable. Flimsy yet corporeal.

Dana takes a drag and smoke disappears into the cloudless air.

<©>

Outside at the bus station it's cloudy, the light green grey and smelling of liquefied pennies. Pretty much what [the forecast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHo26IhDxx0) had said. If there was one thing Maureen missed, it was knowing the weather before anyone else—watching it seep out of the door to Station Management and pool into the carpet under their feet, having it shiver up through rubber and bone and tendon to be translated from feeling into word and sound.

Maureen's phone buzzes in her pocket and she pulls it out by the headphone cord plugged into it. Four notifications: two texts from her parents, a Bandcamp link from Michelle, and an email. A slow rain trickles down the glass sides of the bus stop next to her head as she opens the email. It's a weather alert, oddly enough, that's exactly the same as the one that morning. A redundancy and an "I told you so" all in one.

She puts away the phone without looking at the other notifications. Leaning back against the glass, she feels cold against her shoulder blades.

The flimsy foam and wire of her headphones might as well not be there at all as the music she's trying to listen to is just as quiet as the raindrops. A motorbike buzzing down the street to her right, a truck stopping at the light ahead, a parent and child chattering as they wait to cross, all given the same aural importance by the flattening rain. Everywhere, everywhere noise. This is the weather.

Maureen looks up as someone ducks into the bus stop next to her. The phone in her hands buzzes quietly with something new, but she is busy trying to get a reading on her new neighbor of the corner of her eye.

It's a boy, younger than her but maybe not by much. His jacket and the sweatshirt hood peeking out from underneath it are soaked, but the front of him is completely dry as he hunches over the backpack there. Once completely under the refuge of the bus stop roof, he unfolds himself with a joyful sigh.

"Some weather, huh?" He turns to her with a grin. She gives him nothing.

"Guess I should listen to the radio better." He keeps talking, even as Maureen takes out her phone and turns up the volume where he can see. Inside his backpack, something wiggles. "I don't know, I never trust that kind of stuff. I mean, who even makes that stuff up? What, some scientist just looks at the clouds and decides, 'Guess it's gonna rain today'?"

"No."

Maureen sighs internally as she says it, but she can't help it. It just blurts out of her in a way she's unused to around strangers.

The guy raises an eyebrow. "You some kind of metrologist?"

"Meteorologist," she corrects, "and that's not how it works at all."

"So what, are you a cloud whisperer?"

She doesn't say anything, rewinding back the song she missed and looking back at her texts for something to do. Michelle wants to know if she wants to come over to Dark Owl in a few days, they got in some new stock, some probably not lame stuff. Her parents want to know when she's coming over for dinner. Maureen doesn't want to make any plans, but she'll take anything she can get that's not this jerk off.

"I know why I recognize you," the guy says after a while. For some reason the bus still hasn't come, her reluctant knight in big, shining, reinforced armor. The guy's backpack wiggles again, loosening the zipper, and a crowing noise comes out of it, but he doesn't seem to notice.

"Yeah?" Maureen says as she texts Michelle back. It isn't really a question. "What's that?"

"You're that intern chick." She stops typing. "The bitchy one who was in the desert but didn't become the mayor. M-something, right?"

The bus pulls up to the curb then, kicking up some gutter muck. The guy is smiling at her, this faux knowing smile that looks at her like he's finally realized her secret. The bus driver glares at them and the guy waggles his eyebrow, waving one arm to the open steps. A crow head pokes out of his bag.

Maureen turns out of the bus stop and heads down the sidewalk. She'd rather walk, even as purple lightning streaks the sky and pebbles start to be interspersed with the raindrops.

<©>

One of the duties of the mayor is the blessing and ceremony of every new business founded within civic limits. This week, Dana is gracing the new co-op, two doors down from the Pinkberry where the old deli used to be. Dana remembers going there with her mother for sandwiches after tee-ball.

It feels strange to be walking into the same place as such a different person, in such a different context, both of them adorned and unchanged. There are a few reporters there—Leann Hart with her legion of hatchet wielding copywriters, a few bloggers hiding covertly behind the unleavened bread, and a young man in a familiar shade of aubergine. She makes sure to throw a smile at the intern, but he doesn't see it as he tries to stop his tape deck from eating its own cassette. She smiles again, this time for herself. Ah, the good ol' days.

In the back of the co-op, behind the meat counter, about half of City Council is lurking. Or at least, it looks like half. Dana doesn't know exactly how many bodies they usually consist of, but it looks like less than usual. She can only count five or so, and usually it's a higher estimate than that. Maybe they're working part time now, she doesn't know. Times are tough.

Feeling newly bolstered by her job security, Dana goes through the ceremony with more enthusiasm than she thought she had available. She taps into some sort of mayoral reserve present withing us all, only made available should we need it, and it's renewing.

Chanting, bleeding, and blessing finished, Dana mingles with the press and assorted patrons. The co-op is bright and clean, almost too bright, so they congregate outside.

"Yes, I'm sure it will come up at the next meeting," she says to Leann, who is knee deep in her anti-internet journalism spiel for the millionth time. Privately Dana would rather resign (in all the gore that implies) than ever actually take Leann's side, but mayors aren't allowed to disagree with their constituents, so she must only smile and nod.

As Leann starts to brag about how many bloggers she bagged last weekend, Dana excuses herself unnoticed. The intern (whose name, she's remembered, is Jared) has started wrestling with his recording, and not in a "struggling abstractly" way, but literally. Dana unwraps the body strap of his Califone CAS1500 and gives him a hand up. Her hand passes over the bottom of the recorder to keep it from dropping and unconsciously feels the masking tape there. Even though she knows it wouldn't be, a part of her expects to turn it over and see her own name there in blocky Sharpie.

"Sorry, Mayor Cardinal," Jared says as he takes the device out of her hands. Dana starts, a little imaginary electrocution.

"No problem," she says. "It's Jared, right?"

"Yeah!"

The kid is bright and earnest. It must be his first month still.

"Sorry," he continues, "it's just— It's an honor to meet you."

Dana's mouth smiles, but her heart does not. It's not that she doesn't love Cecil, or that she resents him for his constant chatter about the people he is closest too. That's just who he is, everyone knows that. It's just...

The way Cecil talks makes you feel included; his cadence, his familiarity, his diction. His words and the way he uses them make you feel like you know the subject as intimately as him. It's part of what makes him such a good broadcaster, this coaxing into camaraderie, and Dana doesn't blame him for it. It's not his fault people take his word as the end-all-be-all truth on any subject, but, well, it isn't always a help.

The thing is, Dana isn't one dimensional. She is Dana Cardinal, Mayor of Night Vale, longest living Night Vale Community Radio intern, yes, but she is more than the sum of those few parts. There is more to her than those mere anecdotes on the radio, but not to them. Not to the listeners, who know this persona rather than this person. This breathing, living human being.

It's not his fault though—Jared's, Cecil's.

"Tell him I say hi," she says with a surface smile, and she watches as Jared salutes her and walks away with his growling recorder in tow.

<©>

Once a week Maureen has dinner with her parents. They're perfectly fine people, if a little too trusting (as so many people are) of the powers that be. But then, you didn't get to be the person Maureen is without a little disillusionment. Her mother was painfully regular, her father doubly so, insidiously average in every way and understanding absolutely nothing about what has made Maureen who she is.

She hated her parents the way some people just did: she was overall indifferent on the subject, but because the default state was supposedly deep and unending love, she hated them to differentiate.

"So," her mother says once she's swallowed her second mouthful of mashed potatoes, "what's new in the life of Maureen?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?" Her father chimes in. He is crunching on some chips. Maureen's family is big on potato-based foods. It's embarrassing.

Maureen spaces out in the direction of the living room window. Through the kitchen, past the stairs up to the bedrooms, is the flat house's main opening to the outside world. The window and dull white walls surrounding it are spotless, and it feels like it's never changed and never will. God, she hates it.

"How's the job search going?" Her mother prompts.

Maureen ignores her, focusing on the one twenty-fifth scale replica of the mashed potatoes scene from seminal Ken Burns docudrama  _Close Encounters_ she's recreating out of her own dinner. It's meta commentary on the repetitive nature of time, and also she's sick to death of potatoes and doesn't want to be there.

"I remember the last time I was unemployed," her father says in the same voice that sang her to sleep almost every night for years but now is purely grating. "It was just after we were married, I had left the firm to go back to school and—"

"No one cares," Maureen blurts. "No one cares what your life was like five hundred years ago."

"Actually, it was only twen—"

"Your past? Is  _nothing_ like my present." She sticks her fork squarely in the middle of Richard Dreyfuss's head. She feels dramatic and loud with purpose, necessarily out of character. "Going from grocery store to accounting firm to bank to retirement is a perfectly normal career path. I lived in another plane of existence for six months just because my box asked for a glass of orange juice."

"We've all had days like that, honey," her mother chimes in. "When I was the mayor's secretary, I—"

"Stop." Maureen shuts her eyes for as long a moment as she dares. "Do you even hear yourself? You two are the most boring people in this entire town. There's no way you can understand what I'm feeling right now."

Her mother sighs and puts down her own fork, but says nothing. The kitcehn fills with silence so thick not even the sprinklers and the helicopter blades outside can fit in. Maureen feels herself drowning.

Outside it is too windy to rain, and it is also dry and still. She feels the deepest divide breaking inside her, like two of her are existing with an overlap, a left shoulder within a right, trying to breathe through a heartbeat and beat through a breath.

That must be where the drowning is happening.

"Honey." Maureen jerks back from the table but doesn't stand. "We know it's hard. Ever since you got home, and then when you stopped seeing that nice boy, Chase... you haven't been the same. We're worried."

"You're not worried."

It sounds like the standard stock phrase of the teenager who doesn't appreciate the sacrifices of their family and the similarities of their parents. The truth of the words, though, far outweigh their implied cliche.

"You were never worried," Maureen continues. "The only time you had anything to say was when mourning my assumed death became inconvenient for you. Me being alive was a disappointment."

She drops her hands on the table and stands for the door.

"We weren't disappointed," her mother says as Maureen stands in the open doorway, still behind the screen door. "We were... tired."

Maureen stares out at her car on the curb. The asphalt below and around it is dry but there are water droplets lining the bottom of her windows.

"You can always be an intern again," her father adds. "If you need to."

She's already starting the car, the house door left open, the tableau of her parents in their places visible through the mesh. The front seat is damp and she rolls up her window.

<©>

When Dana next needs groceries, she doesn't go to the co-op. A feeling of stagnation rips through her every time she so much as pictures that square of sidewalk outside, and besides, they're suffering a nasty freshman case of citrus weevils.

The aisles of produce buffeting the entrance are a familiar misty battleground, and by the time she makes it into the store proper, she's panting and exhilarated. Even having to shake hands with the more decorous and socially stringent citizens or just smile and wave at faces with varying degrees of familiarity wasn't as draining as usual.

In the dairy aisle she runs into John Peters, you know, the farmer. They exchange pleasantries over a jointly reached-for box of butter.

"Well howdy, Dana!"

Dana picks up a different but identical box and puts it in her basket. "Hi, John."

"Rough day at the office?"

"Hm?"

John motions to her forehead and when she reaches up, her hand comes away red. Bright, deep red, reflecting off the fluorescent lights so warm they feel like the daylit sun.

"Oh," she says. "No. Just a run-in with some cantaloupes."

John nods solemnly. "It's just about time for their teeth to grow in, huh?" He asks. "That was always the roughest part of the growing season."

Starting to nod along politely, Dana stops.

"You used to farm cantaloupe?"

"Yeah." John pulls off his hat and puts it in the cart in front of him. Dana can't help but take inventory of its contents as John runs a hand through his hair; a bag of tortillas, six apples, imaginary popcorn, a box of caramels, and now a box of butter. The coherence and eclecticism of it suggests a story Dana sort of wishes she knew.

"—back before imaginary foods got big," he is saying when she looks back up. "We had a couple of different fruits and veg, but the cantaloupe were always rowdiest. Sold the best, though. So sweet, once you got around the teeth in the middle."

"I never knew that," Dana admits. A shiver runs through her arms as her body starts to realize it's standing in a hallway sized refrigerator. "I mean, as long as I've known, you've been—well, I guess just an unspecified farmer."

"The farmer," John corrects with a smile. "Yeah, you know, that's just how people see me. And I guess that's true, it's just not very specific, or all-encompassing."

Dana nods, slowly and deeply. She must have a certain look on her face because John just half smiles and says, "Well, I'll see you later," as he turns to leave.

"You take care of yourself now, Dana," he says before he turns the corner out of sight.

Of all the times she's heard those words, here they feel the most sincere, and she pays attention this time. And maybe she'll backtrack to pick up one of those cantaloupes too. She can't remember the last time she had some.

<©>

The far end of the counter in Dark Owl Records has worn indent from disinterested elbow leaning. Mostly that's Michelle Nguyen, who is disinterested like it's her job. It is. Her job, that is. Being disinterested is one of the core tenets of record store owning.

But more and more often now the elbow in that spot belongs to Maureen. Since the army thing fell through, she's had a lot of free time, and Michelle appreciates the help scaring costumers away from the new releases section. Or at least, that's what Maureen thinks. She never actually said, of course, as it would be completely sacrilege to admit to having a positive reaction to another human being. Whatever, Maureen gets it. She'd rather not say anything either.

"Did you like the tapes?"

Or maybe she _would_ rather say something, something else to the same extent.

"Yeah," Maureen says as she watches Michelle out of the corner of her eye, "they were good. I liked the part where it was just whispering cuz it's like, aren't we all just whispering, in the end?"

Maureen isn't sure any of that makes sense, but it sounds cool and Michelle nods, so she'll take it.

"Could you understand it?" And now Michelle sounds nervous, on the edge of something she won't talk about yet, so Maureen just tells the truth.

"Not really."

"Good."

Michelle disappears in and out of Maureen's field of vision as she rearranges things behind the counter. It's weird, but even when she can't see her, Maureen knows Michelle is still just over there, both because her noise would be enough for even the most rudimentary echolocator, and because the feeling of there being another person in the room is more concrete than usual.

The truth, as we know, is highly subjective, so when Maureen said and Michelle heard the same thing, they had very different interpretations. Michelle heard "not really" and got "I couldn't actually tell what you were saying, or even that it was you, but I don't want to seem like I don't understand", a perfectly valid reading.

What Maureen meant, though, was more along the lines of "I turned the volume all the way up and could hear you whispering that you wish we could see each other more and that you know I am lost right now but that that's okay because we're all lost and no one knows what they're doing and if I wanted you would get me a real job at the record store as a temporary definition of my self and I comprehended it perfectly well but I don't know what it means." That was a lot of words to infer, though, and she knows it didn't quite work.

Someone wearing a Twenty One Pilots shirt walks in and Maureen just points at the poster on the window of cancelled bands until they walk out again. The store is silent, the only sound the air conditioner, the faint hum of the music constantly playing in the background, and the two sets of breathing. When Michelle turns back around, Maureen decides to try again.

Turning around to lean forward against the counter, she asks, "So when do the temps come back?"

"A couple of months," Michelle says as she straightens the alt rock section back to it's particular haphazard state. "Then I have to do the incantations over again and ugh, it's a whole big thing."

"It must get lonely. Y'know, being alone all the time."

Michelle shrugs. "Lonely is our default state. We could all do with being better at being alone."

She pauses.

"Besides," she says as she turns her back to Maureen, "it's never too busy."

"Right." Maureen goes back to her standard lean. "Well, if you ever need any help, I'm not doing much. Plus, scaring people away is fun."

She hears Michelle sharply turn around. Without looking, she tries to picture what expression she is making. Surprised? Angry? Confused?

"Yeah," Michelle says, unhelpfully, with no particular inflection, "you know, if you want to. I guess it could be fun."

Maureen pretends to glance at her watch, even though she doesn't have one and no one is looking at her anyway. She doesn't know what time it actually is, but her emotions are telling her to get out of there before she makes things too weird.

"Well, I have class," probably, "so I should go," but don't want to.

"Okay."

Wait, did she say fun? Michelle never says fun. Does she? Wait.

Maureen tries not to startle as Michelle moves into the corner of her eye, then the side of her eye, then the front. Her hair is loose, her glasses slightly smudged, and she is looking Maureen in the eyes before she closes her own. Like a nail gun she's in and out to kiss Maureen on the cheek as unobtrusively as possible.

"Bye."

Maureen blinks six times. "Yeah, uh..." She picks up her backpack from the counter behind her and goes to the door. "I'll see you later?"

"Mhm." Michelle is looking down at the counter but her blush is visible from across the shop. "See you later, Maureen."

She pushes open the door and steps out onto the sidewalk, walking tall. The bell swinging shut is her new favorite sound and she makes a mental note to tell Michelle about it later.

Halfway down the block it starts to rain, coming towards her like a wave, and she walks straight into it. It's on the way to where she needs to be, and it's not too bad.

<©>

Dana shows up ten minutes early. She takes the spare key from her heavy ring (seven in, the grey and secondary purple tag), unlocks the backdoor, flicks on the limiting florescent lights. The three metal chairs are wheeled out on their levered rack, the banner pulled taut by the reinforced corners, the box of gluten-free donuts and saturated coffee, all set out in their somewhat proper places.

Maureen opens the door backwards with her whole weight on the lock as she is completely absorbed in the fingers skipping across the screen of her phone. She smiles absently and Dana closes her mouth before actually saying anything. She's never seen that before, that smile.

When Maureen finally looks up, Dana is distracting herself with a stack of papers from her purse. There were a few things she still had to get done today, but there was still light to do them by. After this she would walk down to the hall of public records, if the weather stayed nice, and maybe have an early dinner.

Maureen gives her texts one last glance before joining her. "How's it going, chief?" She asks.

"Good," Dana says with a genuine smile. "How are you, Maureen?"

Her minute pause shows how honest her answer is.

"Good," Maureen says offhandedly. "We waiting for anybody? Cuz boy have I had a week."

Dana thinks.

"No. We're not waiting on anything."

**Author's Note:**

> title from "[tianchi lake](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEgUtLeAwrc)" by the mountain goats. i woke up with only it written at the top of note on my phone from 1am and got really excited bc i thought i thought it up but nope, just my buddy john darnielle, it's fine, whatever.
> 
> last night i had my yearly "holy fuck i love welcome to night vale so much" outpouring born of seeing it live again, so i figured now is a good time to do a final proofread and post this. i mean, i already did my regular twitter breakdown over how important it is to me, this was just the next step.
> 
> this was meant to be a 100 word funny little thing about life after radio and turned into this motif laden behemoth of a character study. there's about eight hundred details in here that aren't that important, and yet i put a ridiculous amount of thought into them, so hmu in the comments section if you want author's commentary annotations lol
> 
> tumblr @[moonfullofstars](http://moonfullofstars.tumblr.com)


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